Top Lucrative Passive Income for 2020

Contrary to what many people expected at the beginning of the year, 2020 has taken a different course entirely. Perhaps you planned that 2020 was “the year” to finally go on a vacation or get a new degree or meet other life goals, but the Covid-19 has placed a hold on your dreams and aspirations for the year. 

Dreams and aspirations aren’t the only things that have been tampered with due to the pandemic, the economy has suffered as well. The current Covid-19 pandemic situation has led to the job loss of millions of Americans who now have to rely on the government for unemployment assistance. While the US government has placed top priority on the welfare of its citizens, there are concerns as to how long government monthly supports could last.

While the Covid-19 pandemic presents a major downside to workflow, income flow, and daily life, you can still search out other opportunities that you could explore before you get your finances back on track. In this article, we will be discussing over 15 lucrative passive income ideas that you can consider for the rest of the year. The good news is that many of these ideas can be executed remotely or from the comfort of your home.

What is Passive Income?

Passive income can be simply defined as the income that comes from other sources other than an employer or contractor. According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), passive income can stream in from two sources: rental property or a business that you are not actively engaged in such as stock dividends or receiving book royalty payments.

The general notion about passive income is that you don’t have to do anything much to earn income. It has the “get-rich-quick” appeal, yet a lot of work may still have to be put in if you want to see good results. Still, passive income is a great way to source supplementary funds. It comes in very handy especially during major economic meltdowns, recessions, or job loss. If you are dedicated enough, you can make a living off of passive income. As a matter of fact, passive income is a good strategy for wealth building. 

“Passive income is earnings derived from a rental property, limited partnership, or other enterprises in which a person is not actively involved.” (Investopedia)

Passive Income Ideas

There are some passive income ideas such as dividend stocks, peer to peer lending, rental properties, etc., that require you to invest money upfront to generate passive income later. While some others such as selling eBooks online, creating courses on Udemy, selling stock photos, etc., require good time investment instead of money to generate passive income.

1.    Dividend stocks

Dividend stocks are a reliable way to earn passive income. This type requires an initial fund investment to generate passive income later. Before committing your money into just any online brokerage, be sure to do a lot of research to find good stocks and determine ahead of time the amount of money you will like to invest. The amount you invest will determine how much dividends you receive. Also, note that not all stocks pay dividends, so you may want to keep your eye out for the ones that pay dividends. 

2.    Robo-Advisor Investment

If investing directly in the stock market through dividend stocks is not your “thing” you can still explore other ways to passively invest in the stock market. You can achieve this through a Robo-advisor. As the name implies, a Robo-advisor is a robotic financial advisor that provides investors with well-informed financial assistance. If you opt for this, you can spend about 10 to 15 minutes answering some questions, then the Robo-advisor will process your profile based on the information provided.

Once you set up a Robo-advisor account, the Robo-advisor can handle the rest for you. They make it really easy to invest automatically without getting actively involved with trades and investments.

3.    High Yield Savings Accounts and Money Market Funds

High yield savings account and money market funds put the “passive” in passive income. If you have extra cash and are yet to decide what you want to do with it, you can put it into any of the above-mentioned accounts. It’s basically putting your money to work for you and bring returns. With rising interest rates, money kept in a savings account can generate safe passive income.

Both accounts are similar, only that high yield savings accounts can only be found in banks and are FDIC insured. While Money market funds are accessible both at banks and investment companies that are not always FDIC insured. 

4.    Rental Properties

Rental properties avail the opportunity of generating fantastic passive income. Usually, this requires that you already have rental properties on the ground beforehand. However, the internet has made it possible for non-property owners to invest in rental properties by becoming a limited partner in residential or commercial buildings. You can also buy rental property online and become a landlord. Whichever works best for you. To really explore the “passive” side of rental properties you can outsource the property management to a management company and get your passive income at the end of the rent term.

There are a wide variety of rental property options to explore. You can invest in Single Family Homes, Multi-family Homes, Commercial Properties, Farmland, or invest in properties through online rental properties investing platforms.

5.    Invest in a Business

Another strategic way to generate passive income is to invest in a business. This is very risky, but it is definitely worth the try. The best you could do is run a thorough check on the business and see if it has strong potentials to generate strong revenue over time. Some businesses may seem small at the onset but hold great potentials of becoming big companies. A good example is Uber. Several years ago, the cab-hailing company was in need of private investors to invest in their business, today, the company is worth billions of dollars.

You can lend money to businesses through small company bonds or through other channels such as crowdfunding and online small business funding platforms.

6.    Peer-to-peer lending

Peer-to-peer lending or P2P lending is the practice of individuals loaning money to individual borrowers who may not qualify for traditional loans. As a P2P lender, you are at liberty to select who you choose to lend money to. You can also call the shots of the loan terms such as how much you are willing to loan out, interest rate, and loan term. There are online peer-to-peer lending platforms you can register with as a lender. Or, you can decide to go solo. The advantage of using online lending P2P is to protect your “investment.” These platforms ensure that lenders are well guaranteed of getting their money back with the agreed interest. They also run background checks on borrowers to be sure of their credibility to repay the money. Some P2P lending platforms offer their investors up to 6% returns on average, which is a cool way of making passive income.

7.    Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has to do with partnering with a company to market their products as an affiliate. For every item, you successfully sell the company gives you a commission. You can start by creating a blog or website where you can put up marketable content about a product with a sales link attached to it. While this sounds really cool, you must be willing to put effort into promoting a product by attracting readers to your site and compelling them to make purchases through compelling content. The commissions may differ by the items, and it may take a longer time to generate passive income, but consistency is key.

8.    Freelance writing

A lot of blogs, websites, and companies are in need of good writers that can help promote an online presence. As a freelance writer, you can earn cool cash by creating written content for blogs, sales copies for businesses looking to advertise their brand and product. You can either find clients by searching the internet and looking up sites like Craigslist. Or, you could try freelance platforms that connect writers to clients.

9.    Start a YouTube channel

This is one lucrative passive income stream that holds a lot of benefits it properly understood. There are many ways to passively earn income through YouTube channels, either by airing your opinions on trending events, creating DIY videos, vlogging, or sharing helpful life hacks. Making money through YouTube requires that you have a large subscriber base. YouTube gives rewards for higher viewer counts, however, there a couple of other ways you can make money off YouTube-like product endorsement. 

10.    Manage Social Media Accounts

Creating a strong social media presence is key for many businesses and individuals alike. To be more effective on social media, many small businesses often hire the services of social media managers to create engaging content for their pages. Managing social media accounts also means that you must be actively engaged with the audience at any given time. 

11.    Freelance Graphic Design

As a freelance graphic designer, you can work with small businesses or brands to improve their brands. You can create content for social media platforms, websites, or newsletters. If you are skilled in using InDesign or Photoshop you can take advantage of this opportunity and reach out to small businesses within your area.

12.    Sell items on Amazon

Amazon is an e-commerce platform that connects sellers to buyers easily. If you already have an existing product, you can easily sign up as a seller on Amazon and upload your products available for sale. It’s as easy as that but a lot of work has to be put into marketing and advertising before you can begin generating passive income streams.

13.    Sell an eBook Online

Self-publishing and selling an eBook on sites like Kindle is an easy way to generate passive income. Depending on the type of writer you are, putting an eBook together and uploading it online may be an easy process. However, to generate income from it, you must put a lot of work into promoting your book.

14.    Create an Online Course

Many people literally earn a living by making online courses and selling them. If you enjoy teaching and are sound a couple of subjects, you can combine them into online courses and sell on academic websites like Udemy, Coursera, and SkillShare. The courses can be in forms of audio, video, or eBook. Information products create a fantastic passive income stream because you can make money after a while. 

15.    Transcription

As a transcriptionist, you will basically have to listen to audio files and transcribe them. Similar to data entry, transcription doesn’t require overthinking. It is a relatively involved kind of job. Typically, transcription jobs pay by the hours. Therefore, if an audio is one hour long or more, you can be sure to earn some cool cash for your work.

16.    Sell Stock Photos

There is no end to finding pictures to create a stock photo library where people can buy pictures. If you have a good eye for photography and own a good camera, you can take up the opportunity of either selling your pictures to buyers online or create your own stock photos album for sale. 

17.    Start Airbnb rental

Airbnb doesn’t require much from you as long as you have a spare room in your house to rent out, or even an apartment or an extra house. If you have any of these in place, you can go ahead to list your available space on Airbnb. This is a less stressful way of generating passive income. The only work you may have to do is ensure that the free space is well-prepared for your guests. 

18.    Rent out your car

This is quite similar to renting out your extra space in exchange for cash. You can also list your car for rent. It is a truly passive way to earn money because once you are not using your car, you can be sure that it is going to earn you some extra cash. There are sites like Turo that allow you to list your car for rent. Once that’s done, the platform handles the rest. There are other cool ways to generate passive income with your car such as advertising on your car and getting listed with a cab-hailing company.

19.    Become an influencer on social media

Becoming an influencer on social media doesn't require much work. However, getting to the point of making money off of it requires that you build a strong online presence and traffic. You don’t need any upfront payment to become a social media influencer. Being an influencer means that you must be able to capture people’s interest and actively engage a large number of audience. 

20.    Start a storage rental business

If you have some free space in your garage or basement or probably a proper storage property, you can rent out the storage space. You can decide to charge the renters on a monthly or yearly basis depending on the agreement you have. 

There are so many other options to consider, such as;

• Raw Land Flipping
• Consulting
• Vehicle Advertising
• House sitting
• Email Marketing
• Buy and Sell Domain Names for Websites
• Laundromat
• Business Outsourcing

Conclusion

Passive income is a great way to have extra cash rolling into your account “effortlessly.” However, passive income requires that you put in a lot of work to set up. It takes initial efforts and investment of time and/or money to set up a passive income stream, but it always pays off over time. There is no end as to how many passive income streams a person can have. The number of your passive income streams depend on your financial goals per time. Attaining financial independence is faster with passive income, that is, in addition to your regular income.